This blog is my ramblings about building and flying my airplanes. Its purpose is to give me some kind of documentation of my build process but in truth its only here so I don't have to keep answering the question...what are you working on now? ;-)

Sunday, December 18, 2016

This week was trim tab time. I figured I could knock them out in a few hours....right... Anyway they are getting close to being ready to "glue" up and then rivet. I skipped a few steps on the elevators because the next step for them is to glue (proseal) some foam spacers in place and I wanted to do the prosealing all at one time.

I did get to do a little flying the weekend. Jeff and I went out Friday afternoon and just looped the Puget Sound. Then on Saturday we met up with Martin and went to Jefferson County airport for a little breakfast.

Elevators ready for the trailing edge sequence.

Jeff against Mt Si as we pass over my house.

Another shot of Jeff near Mt Si.

Sunset Friday evening. It was so cold my oil temperature wasn't getting hot enough to boil the moisture out so I did an aggressive climb up to about 7500' to warm up the oil. While I was up there I caught this picture but it really doesn't do the colors justice.

Jeff and I do our run-up checks. The sun was just starting to break out over Mt Rainier. Temperature was about 21 degrees when we took off.

We ran into a little light snow at Jeffco. This is Martins RV-4 parked next to me and the snow is drifting around. Not much wind so it was cool to see the snow blow around the prop and plane as we landed.

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Yep, this week I spent most of my free time on the 10. The elevators seem to be taking forever but slowly they are coming together. I find that when I reach a point where I stress about a particular step I tend to delay it more than I should. Such is the case here. I have been thinking about how to best rivet the trailing edge where Van's wants a special bucking bar. Well I figured it out and think I found a better solution. I like to use my tungsten bucking bar whenever I can as it seems to make much better shop heads. I used a little gorilla tape and my old metal bolt gauge to come up with an interesting solution that worked very well.

Here is the solution...Notice the bend in the metal plate..that's there to help angle the tungsten bar properly while allowing me to put some leverage on it and not ding the lower skin. One other note of interest, I did elevate the aft spar just about a quarter of an inch so that the angle was better and the flex on the top skin was less.

And the top rivets are the ones I used the special bucking bar on. I think they came out better than the ones on the bottom that I had to do free hand.

And here they sit at the end of the day on Sunday. Still not done but very close. Just a little more riveting and I can start on the trim tabs.

OH, we got a little snow this week so I had to take a pic.

Last year the starter in the 9A broke just before I was to take one of my IFR lessons. I replaced this starter with a new one and put this one on the shelf thinking I might find another one and between the two make one working starter. I found out that Sky-Tec will rebuild any starter for less than half the price of a new one. I took this picture as I was boxing it up to send back. This will make a nice starter for the 10.

The cold weather also prompted me to get my Switchbox hooked up again. I took this picture so I would remember my account info. This neat little device allows me to start the pre-heat heater on my airplane from anywhere with a text message. Pretty cool!

Monday, December 5, 2016

This week I spent pretty much the entire week working on the Induction system for the 9. As I've mentioned before I seem to have a problem with my engine running too rich at takeoff. I sent the fuel servo back to Airflow Performance and there is nothing wrong. I did buy one of their new induction systems because the next most obvious cause would be turbulent air flow at the inlet to the fuel servo. Since the new induction parts didn't fit with my cowling I have been modifying them to work. As you can see in the pictures below I came up with what I hope is a good solution.I did get a chance to fly it this weekend and I found both good and bad. The good is that the airplane is actually a couple of knots faster! The bad, but controllable, is that on takeoff with the induction wide open I actually indicate up to 18 gph now. Not the direction I was hoping to go with that number. I say its controllable because I can adjust mixture manually to keep the fuel flow down where I want it. Not sure what to do next. Originally I thought it might be an indication issue but given the amount of power that I can add by pulling the mixture out to about 13.5 gph I don't know that it would be just indication.

So the first thing I did was to cut the majority of the alternate air inlet off. Then I JB welded some screen to the new inlet. I then fabricated a cover piece of the same screen material and sandwiched a piece of filter material between the two screens. This will allow air to flow in but no chunks.

The top screen is screwed to both sides and the edges are bent to capture the filter material. This picture has the inlet upside down such that the alternate inlet will pull from the bottom of the cowling.

Here it is after Harry and I installed the new inlet.

This is the other side of the inlet showing the alternate air flapper valve controller.

Test flight with Harry and Jeff. In this flight we buzzed Martins house, Jeff's mom and boss, and Harry's neighbors. Then we went to Bremerton for some lunch.

And this is the next shot in the sequence. Pretty cool photo even though we were not in tight formation.

Martin took this picture as we were making our second pass over his house. Notice the jet behind the clouds on the right?